Communists' Slide Weakens Checks on Putin's Power

By C.J. CHIVERS

Published: July 5, 2004

MOSCOW, July 4—
When Russia's Communist Party convened what might have been its grand party congress this weekend, the setting could hardly have been more bleak. The concert hall booked for the occasion was nearly half empty. And somehow -- the leadership called it sabotage -- there was no electricity.

Minutes after the singing of Russia's national anthem, even the emergency lights went out.

''War has been waged against the Communist Party,'' its leader, Gennadi A. Zyuganov, boomed into the darkened hall. An aide held a flashlight so the party leader could read his notes. ''War without rules.''

Beset by internal strife and outmaneuvered by President Vladimir V. Putin, the Communists in Russia are at their weakest point since they returned in 1993 after a two-year ban.

On the surface, their misfortune is a natural decline for a political party still unsure of its way after Soviet times. Any party whose leader declares that ''capitalism is death,'' as Mr. Zyuganov did Saturday, could not reasonably expect widespread success in a society eager for international respect, high-paying jobs and Western goods.

But more deeply, the party's slide toward irrelevance signifies both the ascendancy of Mr. Putin and what analysts describe as the attendant risks of that rise. In one of the stranger outcomes of Mr. Putin's consolidated rule, the Communists, political descendents of Lenin and Stalin, had represented a last chance for a system of parliamentary checks and balances upon which open societies rely.

For now, that chance is gone.

''The Communist Party has become marginalized, and I think democracy as a result has suffered,'' said Michael McFaul, a political science professor at Stanford University who specializes in Russia.

The turnabout has been swift.

Last fall, the Communists held 113 seats in the 450-seat Duma, Russia's lower house of Parliament, and were able to influence legislation and sometimes block Mr. Putin's legislative moves. After a trouncing at the ballot box last December, they occupy 51 seats, leaving a large majority to the United Russia bloc that follows Mr. Putin's lead.

Similarly, the Communist candidate in the presidential race this spring captured 13.7 percent of the vote. Mr. Putin took 71.3 percent.

As the Communists' star has dimmed, their remnants have fallen into discord. They are now consumed with personal and ideological strife.

On Saturday, as Mr. Zyuganov delivered his address, a breakaway Communist faction was holding a separate congress on a riverboat, meeting in secret and then sending delegates to a theater at Pushkin Square to say they held the party's reins.

The breakaway delegates claimed to have rounded up a quorum last week and stripped Mr. Zyuganov of power. ''It had become a one-man party,'' said Tatyana Astrakhankina, one of the breakaway faction's leaders, explaining the motivation for trying to change the party's leadership.

Mr. Zyuganov, who has not recognized the would-be putsch against him, insists the situation is reversed. The rival faction has been purged, and its machinations have no legal force, he said.

One result of this elaborate posturing has been that for several days no one has been able to say with certitude exactly who -- or what -- Russia's Communist Party is. Valentin Knysh, one of Mr. Zyuganov's rivals, said it might take the Justice Ministry to decide.

The political chaos mirrors an underlying ideological confusion.

With great nostalgia if not doctrinal loyalty, Russia's Communist Party still rallies around Lenin, but has been trying to convert its founder's socialist ideals into something of modern political use.

Andrei Karelin, who leads a party youth group, described the task as ''creatively developing Marxism and Leninism within the practical realities of the current time.''

What this means depends on who is speaking, but some concessions clearly do not square with Lenin's way. Chief among them: the party recognizes private property and religion. ''We guarantee freedom of consciousness,'' Mr. Zyuganov said Saturday.

But a certain dissonance emerged minutes later, when he proclaimed fidelity to the international socialist revolution, which among other things struggled for redistribution of private property and elimination of religious faith.

Mr. Karelin expressed a more mainstream goal -- social guarantees for the poor, and resistance to Mr. Putin's administration, which he described as ''old guard bourgeoisie.''

Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization Studies, a nongovernment organization here, said: ''Its ideology is totally unclear. The party keeps getting more and more confused.''

The incoherence has not been lost on the public. A poll in May by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Studies found that 76 percent of Russians think support for the Communists is slipping. The main reason for the decline was that ''Communist ideology is in the past,'' the respondents said.

Still, analysts also say much in the party's fall stems from Mr. Putin's climb, and the tactics he has used to appropriate the party's issues.